Superstition has been particularly active in suggesting causes of alarm from the insect world; and where man should have seen only beauty and wisdom, he has often found terror and dismay. The yellow and brown tailed moths, the deathwatch, our snails, as mentioned in p. 231, and many others, have all been the subjects of his fears; but the dread excited in England by the appearance, noises, or increase of insects, are petty apprehensions, when compared with the horror that the presence of this acherontia occasions to some of the more fanciful and superstitious natives of northern Europe, maintainers of the wildest conceptions. A letter is now before me from a correspondent in German Poland, where this insect is a common creature, and so abounded in 1824, that my informer collected fifty of them in the potato-fields of his village, where they call them the “death’s-head phantom,” the “wandering death-bird,” &c. The markings on its back represent to these fertile imaginations the head of a perfect skeleton, with the limb bones crossed beneath; its cry becomes the voice of anguish, the moaning of a child, the signal of grief; it is regarded not as the creation of a benevolent being, but the device of evil spirits, spirits enemies to man, conceived and fabricated in the dark; and the very shining of its eyes is thought to represent the fiery element whence it is supposed to have proceeded. Flying into their apartments in the evening, it at times extinguishes the light, foretelling war, pestilence, hunger, death to man and beast. We pity, rather than ridicule these fears; their consequences being painful anxiety of mind and suffering of body. However, it seems these vain imaginations are flitting away before the light of reason and experience. In Germany as in England, they were first observed on the jasmine, but now exclusively upon the potato, though they will enter the bee-hives, to feed on the honey found in them. This insect has been thought to be peculiarly gifted in having a voice, and squeaking like a mouse, when handled or disturbed; but in truth no insect that we know of has the requisite organs to produce a genuine voice. They emit sounds by other means, probably all external. The grasshopper and the cricket race effect their well-known and often wearisome chirpings by grating their spiny thighs against their rigid wings; and this acherontia atropos appears to produce the noise it at times makes, which reminds us of the spring call of the rail or corncrake, by scratching its mandible, or the instrument that it perforates with, against its horny chest. The object of this noise is apparently a mere sexual call. Heavy and unwieldly creatures, they travel badly, and from the same cause fly badly and with labor; and as they commonly hide themselves deep in the foliage and obscurity, without some such signal of their presence a meeting of the parties would seldom be accomplished.